


in the cold pearl of the night

by essektheylyss (midnightindigo)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Childhood Memories, Complex relationships with your mother, Friendship, Gen, Late Night Conversations, Religious Discussion, spoilers for 118
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:13:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28055196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightindigo/pseuds/essektheylyss
Summary: Essek notices that something's wrong with Jester. It takes him a little while to figure out what it is.
Relationships: Jester Lavorre & Essek Thelyss
Comments: 10
Kudos: 126





	in the cold pearl of the night

**Author's Note:**

> Made myself cry like three times with this one folks, enjoy!

He notices it first when she pulls back from a hug and grins at him, and something in him says that something is _wrong_.

He knows this, of course. He heard the fear in her voice over the messages she’d sent him, but it’s different when her grip on him is tight enough to keep him upright even though her running hug should’ve knocked him prone.

It’s different when he can see the tired lines in her face, can feel the tremble of her hands still clasping him as though she’s afraid that if she lets go she’ll float away—become lost to the astral sea like this thing she is running from.

Running to? It’s hard for him to parse, with the information they have now.

He tries to rest his feet inconspicuously back on the ground, but he thinks she notices.

Regardless, her grin doesn’t waver, as much a feature of her mask as his careful smile is of his, and he gives her that careful smile back. That feeling picks at him, and he searches her face, but only sees the tight pull of exhaustion that he knows this tundra forces upon most who travel outside fortified walls. “I’m so glad to see you,” she says, almost conspiratorially, out of earshot of the others, and his smile cracks a bit, widening.

“I’m very glad to see you as well.”

He notices it again later, when she falls asleep in the tower salon across from where he’s working. He’d planned to return to his office, but it can never quite maintain enough warmth to be comfortable, and the fire in this room is crackling softly and heating the side of his face, and a cat leaves a goblet of mulled wine just beside his hand anytime he reaches the bottom of the previous glass.

Everyone else has gone to bed, but Jester had tried to stay awake to keep him company, claiming she’d been too worried to sleep in the last few days anyway, but it seems the exhaustion he’d noticed before outweighed the stress tonight.

He reaches a midpoint and sits up straight in dim firelight, feeling his spine crack as he stretches for the first time in maybe a few hours. He picks up his wine, still warm, and stands, moving to her to adjust the blanket that several cats had spread over her an hour earlier.

In the process of pulling it over her shoulder, he freezes, as he sees the deeper lines in her face that he had believed were purely exhaustion—but now, in sleep, he realizes what is wrong.

She blinks open her eyes at him, and he blinks back at her, caught in an act of kindness, and she sits up. “Jester,” he says, too shocked to be embarrassed, “have you… aged?”

He regrets asking as soon as her face falls, but she nods and scoots over and pats the sofa beside her. “Yes.”

“How?” he asks as he sits beside her, and her fingers move to the tips of her horns, that are longer than they’d been the last time he saw her. 

“There was… there was a strange circle of statues, out there,” she says, and waves vaguely, but he has seen enough of this barren landscape to know what she means. “I stood on a pedestal and… they told me to ask and they would give me answers, in exchange for taking something from me. And I… I asked about the city. What it was. And they took…” her smile is watery, but no tears fall, and he’s glad for it. He wouldn’t know how to comfort her, because he has never been capable of comforting himself. “They took some of my life for it.”

He thinks of the centuries he likely has left, if his life is not stolen from him first, and tries to guess how old he will be when she dies.

It would be more pleasant if the math wasn’t so quick in his head.

“That is a high price to pay for information.”

She nods and smiles, meeting his eye for only a second before glancing back to the fire. She pulls the blanket tighter around her knees. “But knowledge… knowledge is good. It’s important. I think you believe that too, don’t you? You’ve… That’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it?”

He opens his mouth, intending to deny it, but he can’t lie to her. Not about this. Not anymore. So he stays quiet, and she purses her lips, trying to maintain the smile.

“It’s important,” she says again, and if he was any further from her her voice wouldn’t carry. “We need to know what we’re up against, if we’re going to stop it.”

He still doesn’t quite understand what this thing is that they’re chasing, but he can feel his chest clench just looking at her, aged years, arms crossed and tucked beneath the blankets as she hunches into herself. He has already promised the resources of this outpost and his contacts at the conservatory in Rosohna, and any further reassurances would only be wishful thinking.

“I’m… I’m really, really scared,” she says, and turns to him in earnest now. “But the thing that scares me is that… even if we kill this thing, I…” She reaches out almost reactively and grabs his hand, the one not holding his wine, and shudders. “I have to go back to Mama and show her and… I don’t want her to be sad about it. I don’t ever want her to be sad, and I… it feels like the more I can do, the more I can help, I… I’m always going to make her sad.”

He sighs and leans back into the pillows, offering her his wine. She shakes her head, so he drinks himself. “I don’t think there is a way to grow up not to break your mother’s heart,” he offers softly. “It is the nature of being a child.”

She swallows. “I don’t like that.”

“No,” he smiles wryly, “nor do I.” He sets his glass on the table beside the couch, and settles back in. 

“Have you broken your mother’s heart?”

He barks a laugh. “She does not know how much. But yes. In too many ways.”

“Oh. Right.” She crosses her legs and leans her chin on her hands. “She’s the umavi, right?”

“Yes.”

“So she must be, like, really old, huh.”

“Yes, she is. She was present when the first beacon was discovered.”

“ _Whoa_. But she’s, like, supposed to be perfect, right? Did that make it easier to grow up with her as your mom?”

“Did it make it easier for you growing up with a famous mother?”

She blinks at him, and when he turns and leans sideways against the back of the sofa, she mimics him. “No, I suppose not.”

“Nor I.”

“What’s your mother like?” she asks.

He takes a breath before he can even think to answer, closing his eyes slowly and wondering. What is someone older than one’s entire civilization like? What is a parent you share with two dozen others who have all called her mother at some point in the past millennium? It’s like trying to describe the sensation inside the beacon—no words can contain an idea that large.

“She’s,” he laughs throatily. “Well, she’s very pleasant.”

“What does that _mean_?”

He wonders the same thing himself, from time to time. How he has come to think of her as such, when he privately rages to himself about the evangelizing and the religious worship and the times he woke up from nightmares and stayed in his room because her calm assurances and gentle condescension were worse than the dream.

“It means she is a perfectly agreeable woman with whom I have never seen eye to eye.”

She pulls her knees up to her chest and rests her arms and then her chin on them. “Because of the beacons?”

“Yes, among other things. As you might imagine, she… it is hard to connect with someone that old when you are a child. There was always a…” he likewise has no words to describe the neat state of his childhood, alone among a family to which his birthright was tenuous at best. “A distance, I suppose.”

“But doesn’t she love you?” she asks, and he smiles tightly.

“My mother cares for me a great deal,” he answers, “but I think someone who has experienced as much as she has can only care for a child as a person might care for an abandoned nestling they’ve come across. Something to nurse and raise perhaps, but never in a way that allows them to understand each other.”

“Oh.”

“Your mother seems rather the opposite.”

She cocks her head, lips parted in confusion, then blinks and grins devilishly. “Oh, that’s right. You have seen Mama. I never got a chance to ask you what you thought of her performance.”

He laughs, feeling the nervousness of that party bubble up in his chest unbidden. “Truth be told, I didn’t manage to catch much of it. What little I heard was, ah—“

“Interrupted?” Jester says, and her grin widens, and he shakes his head at her rather abridged version of the evening.

Truth be told, he can barely remember what Marion Lavorre looks like. It’s funny to think that she has such a neutral recollection of what might be classified as the worst evening of his life.

“Yes,” he smiles. “Interrupted.”

“Well I think you should meet Mama sometime,” she says, and takes his hand and squeezes his fingers. He allows her to do it, though he feels very suddenly like it’s not something he deserves. “She’d like you a lot.”

“Well, she doesn’t know what I’ve done.”

“She doesn’t care what you’ve _done_ ,” Jester drawls, almost impatient, “Mama cares about if you’re good right now and if you’re kind and…” she grins again, “well, she’d love you because you’ve always been _super_ nice to me.”

He doesn’t think he can stand Jester Lavorre telling him again, even indirectly, that he’s good or kind. “What was your mother like, growing up?”

“Oh she was wonderful,” Jester says, brightening, and he thinks he can see where exhaustion keeps letting her mask slip and when she pulls it ever tighter over her like a cloak. “Mama’s the best, she used to read me stories all the time and she got me paints so I could paint my room when I was stuck in there while she was working and we would sit on the balcony and watch the sunset over the ocean—”

“She sounds very lovely.”

“She is, she really is,” she says earnestly. “Mama’s perfect.”

The word hangs in the air between them, an offhanded comment from Jester, and she squirms as she realizes what she’s said. 

“I mean, you know, not _literally_ perfect, just like, you know, a figure of speech, not like _your_ mom’s perfect—“

He squeezes her fingers where she’s still holding his and smiles. “I don’t think my mother is really perfect.”

“But she’s the umavi.”

“And who chooses the umavi?” he asks, willing here in this extradimensional space to voice the questions he has kept under his tongue for over a century. “The luxon does not speak to anyone, as far as I can tell, so who has decreed that she or the Bright Queen or anyone else has achieved perfection?”

“Oh.” Jester looks down at their intertwined hands, playing with the pads of his fingertips as she twists her own fingers in his. This touch is the most plain kind of calm, as though they are somewhere they can be content, and not just beyond the grasp of a desolate tundra with things willing to kill them in a heartbeat. In the morning they will return there and continue the momentum carrying the Nein, and now him and the soldiers and researchers under his protection, in the direction of a mission they cannot fail. 

“Growing up under the eye of a ‘perfect’ parent gives one a great disdain for the idea of perfection,” he smiles, baring the sharp fanged tips of his canines. She mimics the action with a small playful growl, turning it almost to a game, and he grins back before settling back into his own neutral smile. 

“But she wasn’t mean to you, was she?”

“No, no, she was… like I say, pleasant.”

“Then what’s wrong with her?”

“Niceties do not necessarily equate to goodness,” he offers, still smiling, returning to that bared grin. “Just look at me.”

“But, Essek,” she starts, her brow furrowed, “you did one really, really horrible, awful thing. And then you put it back. And in the meantime, you helped us out a whole bunch.”

“Certainly—with plenty of ulterior motives.”

“I don’t think your motives cancel out nice things you’ve done. Besides, you just wanted to, like, make sure you didn’t get executed, and I mean, I did a not nice thing and had to leave Nicodranas because I also didn’t want to get executed.”

“Jester, whatever you have done to be run out of Nicodranas, I don’t think our crimes are in anyway on par.”

“Well, sure, but you know, you put it back. And you’re my friend.”

He has never understood the basis of her morality, really, even when she explained the deity from which she gets her magic, but he does know that no one has ever looked at him as much like a person they want around before he had met Jester Lavorre. Even somehow now, knowing what he has done, that gaze has not wavered.

“So, it was just you and your mother, then?” he says, extricating one of his hands to awkwardly pick up and sip from his drink. Funny—it’s still the perfect drinking temperature, though it has sat on this table for several minutes now.

She nods rapidly. “Well, me, and my mom, and her clients, and then the Traveler once I started talking to him, you know,” she says, then adds quickly, “ _well_ ,” with a tilt of her head and a mischievous smile and a waggle of her eyebrows that somehow mimics the shape of her words, “Mama’s clients didn’t really see me, but I sure saw _them_.”

He cannot imagine such an existence, really, but at the same time he can—growing up around several dozen adults with lifetimes and experiences he couldn’t fathom, always seeming to look straight through him even when they were speaking to him.

“That sounds rather lonely.”

And her face falls, and he imagines if she wasn’t so tired and scared she’d have brushed it off. “I… yeah, yeah it was.”

He squeezes her hand again. “I think you are far more comfortable with loneliness than I. Even if you did not deserve it.”

“Well, yeah, I mean, even when I was lonely, I could always talk to the Traveler, you know?” She shrugs a wiggly shrug, like there’s too much energy in her shoulders that she needs to let out. “And then I wouldn’t be so lonely anymore.” She sighs heavily as she looks at him. “If my god didn’t talk to me, I’d definitely try to give him away too.”

Essek opens his mouth again to refute that that’s not exactly what happens—but then he wonders, mid-thought, what might’ve come of him had the luxon been more open to answering the questions he sometimes still quietly asks of it. He has long known that it is a fool’s errand looking for answers from an object, but there is something in him, some childhood hope, that perhaps one day it will speak back.

“Essek,” she asks, still playing with his fingers, “where do you think the inside of the luxon is?”

He blinks. He knows what she’s talking about—that stellar ocean that leaves you with a fragment of time to change whatever you wish—and it is certainly a question he has asked, time and time again, one of the questions to which he knows there is no answer forthcoming. “I don’t know. I have wondered if perhaps it is some distant part of the astral sea, but then it does not quite look as the astral sea does—it is too empty, too open.”

“It is very empty, isn’t it?” She shivers. “There are really, really horrible things in the astral sea.”

“Yes, there are. There are many things in the astral sea.”

“I don’t…” her voice drops to a whisper, as her chin drops to her knees again, “I don’t like it there.”

“That is where this city is, yes? This Eyes of Nine?”

She nods, biting her lip, then smiles again, in the same way that he has been—with teeth bared. “Yeah, it’s… it’s like everyone who was in Aeor when it fell… they were just trapped there in this… this _thing_. This monster.” She shakes her head. “It’s been so long and they’re still trapped there. I can’t… I can still feel it, every time I close my eyes. I don’t ever want to have to feel how that felt again.”

To think that he can picture a version of him, like an echo, in which he had never met the Nein and pursued exactly what this Lucien, what Derogna had been following. Sitting here with his legs drawn in and his hands in Jester’s and her words echoing in his head, he shivers too to imagine that person. 

He’s ashamed that that thought scares him even more than this city does.

She inhales shakily. “When we were… well, last year, before we met Caduceus, before we were good at protecting ourselves, we… Fjord and Yasha and I, we were on watch, and we… we got taken. By these slavers from Shadycreek Run. And I thought… when I was awake I thought for sure…” She shakes her head again. “I didn’t even know if the others were coming. I didn’t know if these people—these _monsters_ —had killed them, or if, if…”

She trails off, and all he can hear as he holds his breath is the crackle of a fire. 

“Caleb and Veth were… they were different then, they didn’t really trust anyone, and Beau… I don’t think Beau would’ve left us, but if she was only one person… and then we had Molly. And he died trying to reach us, and I didn’t even get to tell him goodbye, or how sorry I was that he… that he…”

He squeezes her hand in some semblance of support, and she smiles.

“He didn’t have any memories, and he’d only gotten to be Molly for, like, two years, and then he died, because he was trying to find _us_ ,” she says, and he knows when she places any blame, she really means _‘me’_ , “and now he’s Lucien again, and he’s so, so evil, and he wants to bring this city back, and…” 

He just waits, because even when she trails off it doesn’t seem like she’s done, staring into the space between them. 

“And now I think we’re going to have to kill him, and probably keep him dead, and Molly’s just… Molly’s just gone. He’s gone forever, I think. Lucien said that… that Molly was just a fragment of his soul, that Vess Derogna had… had shattered his soul, somehow. But Molly never seemed like a fragment at all. He felt like so much… so much more than Lucien is. He was nice and fun and a liar and I miss him. I miss him so much. And he’s gone and he can’t come back, not ever, because Lucien’s taken whatever he was and just… just devoured it. Like that city.”

The way she describes it, it’s a fascinating philosophical predicament, whomever this Molly was that had such an impact on her, but he imagines this is not the time to split hairs over the metaphysics of the soul, as much as he might like to. It is a topic that he has always desperately wanted to explore, but parsing the nuances of the soul feels like blasphemy among believers of the luxon.

“Anyway,” she says, pulling that mask down again as she smiles, but the sadness is so deep in these new lines of her face that it doesn’t settle properly, this time around. “I’m glad you’re here. I don’t know what we would’ve done if you weren’t here.”

“I’m glad you’re here as well. I’m glad I can help, in anyway I can.”

“You’re helping,” she says softly.

A clock chimes, perfectly in time even within this wrinkle in reality that Caleb has built, and he blinks as the quiet between them is broken. He looks up to check the time, and winces as he reads the face of it while a little cat pops out of a window at the front to bob in and out with every sound. “Oh, I need to—“ He pats his pockets, and realizes that the pearl is outside of this tower, on his desk, and he stands quickly, catching the dismay on Jester’s face. 

“Are you going?”

“Yes, I… it’s nearly dawn. I was supposed to re-activate the outpost’s darkness hours ago. It’s one of my responsibilities, being in charge, and one of the reasons I have not been able to leave—if I am attuned to it, its effect will end once I am out of range.”

“What is it?” She straightens up, the disappointment gone now, and stands as he begins to move toward the door. “Is it an object?”

“Yes, a pearl,” he nods. “Well, it’s _called_ a pearl, but it’s more of a… it’s like a ball. A sphere.”

“A _ball_?” she asks, wiggling her eyebrows again, and she pauses at the door to blink at her, just to express disapproval that he doesn't really mean at her innuendos.

“It’s like a thing this big, kind of like obsidian, but magic.” He holds his hands half a foot apart to illustrate. Then he smiles. “Would you like to see?”

She nods quickly and follows him out of the tower.

The door opens to his makeshift office, somewhere between a tent and a physical structure. The pearl is cradled in its stand beside the stack of forms that is still on his to-do list, and he passes over them to pick it up, rummaging around his desk with the other hand for his fur hat that covers his ears and his coat, on the back of the his chair. “Aren’t you going to be cold?” he asks, as he pulls them both on, and she stands there in her slippers and her dress that she’d fallen asleep in, and shrugs.

“The cold doesn’t really bother me, really,” she shrugs. “We’re not going to be out there long, are we?”

“Only about ten minutes.”

“I’ll be _fine_ ,” she waves him off, and though he is not quite convinced, he’s already running late on this particular task, so he slips out of the flap of the tent with the pearl tucked into his hands.

The sun will come up within the next half hour, he imagines, with the way the sky to the east begins to glow, a pale yellow streaked with pinks that begin to tinge into the stray clouds left after a storm that has since passed. Some of it reflects in the snow on the horizon, glittering in the distance, and Jester gasps as she follows him.

“The night is so short here,” she says, “I haven’t seen the sunrise.”

“Nor have I,” he admits. This little light does not bother him yet, but he imagines he may be straining his eyes against it by the time he finishes activating the pearl. “Generally I do not let this wait so long.”

“Well,” she says, and slips her arm through his. With his feet on the packed snow, he’s just slightly shorter than her, and though it might bother him with someone else, losing those extra few inches, he doesn’t mind next to her. “I’m glad you did, so we could _both_ see it.”

“It is very nice,” he admits, and begins the process of activating it, feeling it hum in his hands. She starts to shiver a bit by the time he’s done, but she doesn’t complain, and he pretends not to notice.

He feels it crackle to life, and in a burst of shadow like streaks of paint, like a watercolor firework, the darkness shoots into the sky over head and dissipates, and Jester gasps again in wonder as it rains down on them—spectral rain, or ash, or shooting stars.

He has never seen darkness as such a beautiful thing before, only something to be used, but Jester’s bright gaze reflects it well as the night sky settles in, in all of its stellar glory.

She spins, following it, and hums sharply. “ _Oh!_ ”

Behind them, the sky is streaked with green and blue and purple haze that is familiar to Essek, as late as his nights tend to be. “Is this the first time you’ve seen the northern lights?”

She nods. “They’re _beautiful_.”

“They are,” he agrees as she shivers against him, and he wonders how long she will tolerate the cold in order to witness this. It takes several minutes longer, until he is shivering as well, his coat and hat not enough to keep the chill away this far north. “Alright, you may not be bothered by the cold, but I certainly am.”

She nods, then pauses just outside of the tent as they traipse back toward the opening. “Essek?”

“Yes, Jester?”

“Thank you for being here.”

“It's nothing, really.”

“Thank you for being… for being good.” She pats his arm. “I’m glad you’re good now.”

He stops, dumbfounded, the cold almost forgotten. “Jester, I don’t…”

“You’re helping us,” she says, and as they move into the warmth, he thinks the fear he’s seen so often on her face today is alleviated a bit now, enough that he can’t bring himself to protest again. “Even if you’re doing it for yourself, or because, you know, if we don’t stop this thing then it’s going to eat the whole planet, and obviously that’s bad for you too, or…” she trails off for a moment, and then smiles. “You’re helping us do something good. You’ve always helped us do good things. I think that makes you good too.”

And she disappears back inside the tower.

**Author's Note:**

> Their friendship is so important to me, I adore them. I hope you enjoyed!!!


End file.
